To Dylan, Jacob, and Madz
“Classic.” A book people praise and don’t read.
– MARK TWAIN
Dublin, something, something, something, run-on sentence.
Man vs. whale.
Whale wins.
Everyone is sad.
It snows.
Hero kills monster.
Blah, blah, blah.
Dragon kills hero.
Orphan wants more.
He doesn’t get it.
Wait, yes he does.
Man sits outside for two years.
Nothing happens.
Old ladies convince a guy to ruin Scotland.
Everyone is high.
Nothing gets done.
Smell of cake reminds a guy of stuff.
Four thousand pages of stuff.
Lost generation gets drunk.
They’re still lost.
Heroin can really mess you up.
Anyway, here’s an orgy.
If looks could kill, they probably will.
Brothers are very contentious, like their father.
Also Russia.
Kids don’t understand racism.
Adults don’t either.
Moody teen complains a lot.
He has a red hat.
“How Not to Be a Jerk” for knights.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
Then four legs bad.
Girl hates wealthy aristocrat.
Wait, no she doesn’t.
War veteran takes forever to get home, then kills everyone.
Not the Odyssey.
Guy attacks windmills.
Also, he’s mad.
Murderer feels bad.
Confesses. Goes to jail.
Feels better.
War is crazy, unless you are.
Orr maybe not.
Colonialism ruins everything.
Also jungle metaphors.
A really, really long city council meeting.
Socrates is there.
A sort-of brother and sister fall in love.
It’s foggy.
Old-timey Gilligan’s Island.
Owning stuff is problematic.
Farming sucks. Road trip!
Road trip sucks.
There are no winners in war.
And very few adjectives.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Old sailor kills a bird, then interrupts a wedding.
A lost hankie ruins everyone’s relationship.
Post-war America is complicated and depressing.
Booze helps.
Medieval version of “99 Bottles of Beer.”
With sex and poop jokes.
All hell breaks loose.
Some kids and a crocodile pester an amputee.
Booty hunt goes awry.
Then it doesn’t.
Then it does. Then it doesn’t.
Monsters are people too.
Pieces of people.
Hapless sailor is stranded on different lands inhabited by sociopolitical metaphors.
Vision of a dystopian future (now called Tuesday).
Poor boy’s benefactor is a crook.
Old lady is no help at all.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Kid takes a trip on a raft.
Hijinks ensue.
Also slavery.
Angry gods make guy’s trip to Italy an epic ordeal.
Local man comes home and ruins everything.
Two sisters catch husbands.
And one catches a cold.
Guy is prosecuted.
No one knows why.
We don’t know why either.
Busybody badgers everyone to get married.
Middle-earth’s epic jewelry return policy.
Rich, selfish people hang out.
Something about the American dream.
Old king goes mad.
Everyone dies.
Guy hates everything.
Gets married. Kills himself.
Hunt for witches turns into a witch hunt.
Farmer’s life can’t possibly get any worse.
Hey, a sled!
Woman has an affair.
Then it ends.
Then a train.
Workplace romance gets fiery.
Identity theft and cross-dressing causes confusion and marriage.
Things are hidden in art.
Jesus things.
Teen lovers commit suicide.
Wait, no they don’t.
Okay, now they do.
Gothic Scooby-Doo.
With lots of secret passages, fainting, and punctuation.
Puritan tale of adultery, mockery, and embroidery.
Four sisters get married.
Except Beth.
A guy named Christian walks to Heaven.
You get the idea.
Bored woman misbehaves, then kills herself.
Mother dies. Stranger dies.
Existentialism lives.
Boy wants to visit a lighthouse.
Ten years later he does.
Guy becomes a giant bug.
And a metaphor for something.
Still waiting.
Guy with daddy issues mopes and whines about who to kill.
Two drifters.
Dumb one kills soft things.
Smart one kills dumbs things.
Boy meets girl.
Except boy is 37 and girl is 12.
Architect-creep does whatever he wants and won’t shut up about it.
Patricide, incest, and self-mutilation: the play.
An oppressive patriarchy controls women’s bodies.
This book is also about that.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Irish lad is torn between the church and sex.
So he becomes a writer.
Young girl’s fanciful ordeal over footwear.
Jerk kills everyone until he’s king (see also Macbeth).
God allows free will.
Until you mess up.
Then he banishes you.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
A lion eats a witch in a closet.
Some kids watch.
The lion is Jesus.
Deformed bell-ringer in a deformed society.
Guy escapes from jail and kills everyone who put him there.
A modernist’s plea for a smarter society.
In a poem that makes everyone feel stupid.
Young soldier is a hero.
Except he’s not.
Then he is.
Ape? Man?
Ape-man!
Young girl tries to fit in.
She doesn’t.
Thief cons everyone.
Repents. Ends up rich.
Yay?
Three guys in big feathery hats have sword fights.
Another guy shows up.
Clever web designer saves a pig.
Story of political backstabbing.
With actual stabbing.
Life is horrible.
But gardening is fun!
How to win friends and influence people.
Except with no friends and killing people.
Feral boy messes about in the woods then goes home.
A bird flies into some guy’s house and annoys him.
Marooned boys are bad at everything.
Except killing each other.
Redheaded orphan’s antics bother everyone.
Then they don’t.
Senior’s dinner is eaten by sharks.
Cheeky orphan comes of age.
With silliness and naughty bits.
Party planner’s day ends with, well, a party.
Also a suicide.
Fireman memorizes books.
People cause problems.
The world blows up.
A jerk visits Paris in the 1930s.
Boy is adrift with a tiger.
Or people. Or no one. Or God.
Be good or else.
To the dictionary for providing the words and to all of the authors who were able to put them in an interesting order.
The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
–#–
1984, 65
–A–
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The, 68-69
Aeneid, The, 70
Animal Farm, 30-31
Anna Karenina, 86-87
Anne of Green Gables, 146-147
–B–
Bell Jar, The, 131
Beowulf, 11
Bible, The, 156
Brave New World, 17
Brothers Karamazov, The, 24-25
–C–
Candide, 138-139
Canterbury Tales, The, 56-57
Catch-22, 40
Catcher in the Rye, The, 28
Charlotte’s Web, 136
Count of Monte Cristo, The, 125
Crime and Punishment, 38-39
Crucible, The, 83
–D–
Da Vinci Code, The, 90-91
Divine Comedy: Inferno, The, 58
Don Quixote, 36-37
–E–
Emma, 76
Ethan Frome, 84-85
–F–
Faerie Queen, The, 29
Fahrenheit 451, 152-153
Farewell to Arms, A, 50-51
Fountainhead, The, 112
Frankenstein, 62-63
–G–
Grapes of Wrath, The, 48-49
Great Expectations, 66-67
Great Gatsby, The, 78-79
Gulliver’s Travels, 64
–H–
Hamlet, 107
Handmaid’s Tale, The, 114-115
Heart of Darkness, 41
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The, 124
–I–
Iliad, The, 35
In Search of Lost Time, 18-19
Ivanov, 82
–J–
Jane Eyre, 88
Julius Caesar, 137
Jungle Book, The, 142
–K–
King Lear, 80-81
–L–
Life of Pi, 155
Little Women, 96-97
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The, 122-123
Lolita, 110-111
Lord of the Flies, 144-145
Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The, 77
–M–
Macbeth, 16
Madame Bovary, 100
Metamorphosis, The, 104-105
Moby Dick, 8-9
Moll Flanders, 132-133
Mrs. Dalloway, 150-151
Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 94
–N–
Naked Lunch, 22
–O–
Odyssey, The, 34
Oedipus Rex, 113
Of Mice and Men, 108-109
Old Man and the Sea, The, 148
Oliver Twist, 12-13
On the Road, 54-55
Othello, 53
–P–
Paradise Lost, 120-121
Pearl, The, 47
Peter Pan, 59
Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 23
Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 98-99
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 116-117
Pride and Prejudice, 32-33
Prince, The, 140-141
–R–
Raven, The, 143
Red Badge of Courage, The, 128-129
Republic, The, 42-43
Return of the Native, The, 71
Richard III, 119
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The, 52
Robinson Crusoe, 46
Romeo and Juliet, 92-93
–S–
Scarlet Letter, The, 95
Sense and Sensibility, 72-73
Stranger, The, 19
Sun Also Rises, The, 20-21
–T–
Tarzan of the Apes, 130
Three Musketeers, The, 134-135
To Kill a Mockingbird, 26-27
To the Lighthouse, 102-103
Tom Jones, 149
Treasure Island, 60-61
Trial, The, 74-75
Tropic of Cancer, 154
Twelfth Night, 89
–U–
Ulysses, 7
–W–
Waiting for Godot, 106
Walden, 14-15
War and Peace, 10
Waste Land, The, 126-127
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The, 118
Wuthering Heights, 44-45
The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
–A–
Alcott, Louisa May, 96-97
Atwood, Margaret, 114-115
Austen, Jane, 32-33, 72-73, 76
–B–
Barrie, J. M., 59
Baum, L. Frank, 118
Beckett, Samuel, 106
Bradbury, Ray, 152-153
Brontë, Charlotte, 88
Brontë, Emily, 44-45
Brown, Dan, 90-91
Bunyan, John, 98-99
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 130
Burroughs, William S., 22
–C–
Camus, Albert, 101
Cervantes, Miguel de, 36-37
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 56-57
Chekhov, Anton, 82
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 52
Conrad, Joseph, 41
Crane, Stephen, 128-129
–D–
Dante, 58
Defoe, Daniel, 46, 132-133
Dickens, Charles, 12-13, 66-67
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 24-25, 38-39
Dumas, Alexandre, 125, 134-135
–E–
Elliot, T. S., 126-127
–F–
Fielding, Henry, 149
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 78-79
Flaubert, Gustave, 100
–G–
Golding, William, 144-145
–H–
Hardy, Thomas, 71
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95
Heller, Joseph, 40
Hemingway, Ernest, 20-21, 50-51, 148
Homer, 34, 35
Hugo, Victor, 124
Huxley, Aldous, 17
–J–
Joyce, James, 7, 116-117
–K–
Kafka, Franz, 74-75, 104-105
Kerouac, Jack, 54-55
Kipling, Rudyard, 142
–L–
Lee, Harper, 26-27
Lewis, C. S., 122-123
–M–
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 140-141
Martel, Yann, 155
Melville, Herman, 8-9
Miller, Arthur, 83
Miller, Henry, 154
Milton, John, 120-121
Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 146-147
–N–
Nabokov, Vladimir, 110-111
–O–
Orwell, George, 30-31, 65
–P–
Plath, Sylvia, 131
Plato, 42-43
Poe, Edgar Allen, 143
Proust, Marcel, 18-19
–R–
Radcliffe, Ann, 94
Rand, Ayn, 112
–S–
Salinger, J. D., 28
Shakespeare, William, 16, 53, 80-81, 89, 92-93, 107, 119, 137
Shelley, Mary, 62-63
Sophocles, 113
Spenser, Edmund, 29
Steinbeck, John, 47, 48-49, 108-109
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60-61
Swift, Jonathan, 64
–T–
Thoreau, Henry David, 14-15
Tolkien, J. R. R., 77
Tolstoy, Leo, 10, 86-87
Twain, Mark, 68-69
–V–
Virgil, 70
Voltaire, 138-139
–W–
Wharton, Edith, 84-85
White, E. B., 136
Wilde, Oscar, 23
Woolf, Virginia, 102-103, 150-151
JOHN ATKINSON lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is a voracious reader of cereal boxes, microwave instructions, and subtext. John is plagued by a recurring dream where he misses the Renaissance because of car trouble. He also claims to have coined the phrase, “I had a banana on the train,” which everyone tells him isn’t really an expression.
John’s cartoon Wrong Hands has been featured in numerous online and print publications worldwide and can be seen regularly in Time magazine. www.wronghands1.com
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